Stephen Jenkins's List: current

• The piece became its notation to the  extent that in English ‘the music’ came to mean ‘the score’, as in ‘I’m just going  to look at the music’

  • But this nomenclature is changing. Now I have to make sure people understand when I am talking about sheet music. If I say music, they think I mean recordings.
• expert listeners will tend to group sounds by their understanding of the  grouping of musical materials in composition—for example hearing relationships  between themes and between tonal areas—and to assess meaning in terms of the  function of those musical materials in a musical structure, while non-experts will  tend to group sounds by their proximity in time, and to interpret their meaning in  terms of their inherent beauty and the kinds of memories and associations they  seem to evoke

  • This reminds me so much of undergrads admitting that they did not listen for form in music
• performance has traditionally,  among musicologists, been looked down upon. Musicologists, as I have suggested,  were thought to understand, performers merely to do

  • reminds me of the teacher who said he was glad to graduate so he could quit practicing !!!!!
• For now it’s enough  that we begin to entertain the thought that the impossibility of pinning down the  identity and full meaning of a piece of music in one ideal performance might be  not a problem but rather a defining feature of music, one of the main sources of  its power. 
• Far from being a symptom of perceptual and intellectual failure, metaphor is  fundamental to human perception, an index of the ways our brains connect up  stimuli to generate knowledge and ideas.
• It’s striking how few there are from the vocabulary of sound. By far the  majority describe human behaviour, whether expressed through features that can  be seen or features that can be deduced; fewer are derived from the  characteristics of things that we can sense through sight or touch (there are  none of smell). A number describe feelings we have,

  • bookmark
• the idea that music exists independently of performance, although a  staple of musicology and the philosophy of music, is beginning to look distinctly  shaky. For most musical cultures in the world (including western popular music) it  is nonsensical. For western classical music it’s conceivable only because of  notation.
• I shall try to persuade you that how the  music feels while we are listening to it matters more than how it was composed

  • Makes me think of Brahms' notion that one should be able to completely perceive his music by listening, not analyzing.
• The book is entirely concerned with moment-to-moment details. It doesn’t cover the  statistical investigation of large data sets which, as we

  • bookmark 9/1/09
• Timothy Day, A Century of  Recorded Music: listening to musical history (New Haven: Yale  University Press, 2000),
• Robert Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording (Cambridge University  Press, 2004
• ‘The recorded document: interpretation and  discography’, in ed. Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, and  John Rink, The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (Cambridge  University Press, 2009)
• Achenbach, try ‘Disquiet below the surface’ (on  Vaughan Williams’ Pastoral Symphony), Gramophone July 2002,  36-40.

  • online? http://www.gramophone.net/

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